Application APIs are an invaluable extension to many software products, providing a means to quickly and conveniently integrate applications and data to produce value added results for specific purposes.  The resulting derivations are often called mashups.

The creation of mashups belies the convenience they bring to a broad range of applications.  Nowhere is this more evident than in the online mapping arena where software APIs are allowing users to fashion extended applications.

Mapping APIs are abundant – and resulting mashups even more so.  A recent survey of ProgrammableWeb’s directory of APIs showed 130 mapping related APIs out of a total 2,198 APIs.

Interestingly of the 5,271 mashups in ProgrammableWeb’s database, 2,354 fall in the mapping category.  Of the 50 most recently added mashups, 24 utilize a mapping related API exclusively or in combination with other APIs

Looking at the most popular APIs in terms of mashups utilizing them, 8 of the top 50 APIs fall in the mapping category.  Overall, the GoogleMap API is far and away the most popular with 2,100 mashups in the directory utilizing it compared to the Flickr API, next most popular with 552 associated mashups.